The Library of Spanking Fiction: Wellred Weekly
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Articles
Items of interest regarding all things spanking
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Recollections: Memories from the Thirties In the thirties a great many, if not most decent and kindly working class folk, saw nothing wrong with the corporal punishment of children. Every child I knew as I grew up was regularly walloped, usually on the leg or arm, sometimes on the head. All my friends accepted the smacking as a normal part of childhood. That was just the way things were. But in those days I rarely heard of a kid being punished by his parent with anything other than the hand but the frequent smackings meant that most children and especially boys were pretty inured to pain. I never knew any one of my friends who had a bottom smacking after the age of about five. One reads of policemen (most Bobbies were local and knew their customers) clipping boys around the ear. We, my friends and I, had all had clips for hanging on the back of carts, for having a handful of sweets that must have been nicked, for being cheeky, but always the blow was firm rather than hard, more the action of a well respected uncle, and administered with a grin. At State school bored, underpaid and poorly trained teachers spent their days trying to drum 'facts' into the heads of equally bored kids who had a pretty good idea that they too would be labouring folk like their parents, and with equally poor prospects. Kids to whom physical admonishment was the norm sat in dreary classrooms when our parents would have liked us to have been earning to help the family. Teachers saw kids as the source of their own unhappiness and failure, or so I believe. We children saw teachers, with very few exceptions, as (to use a modern term) 'losers' who were there simply because they wanted to work out their frustrations on us and were no good at anything else. My first experience of school came at five years of age. I walked into the playground for the first time with the boy next door; we'd known each other all our lives. He wore glasses and I called him 'four eyes'. I squinted short-sightedly and he called me 'chinky.' The headmistress, with her cane beneath her arm like a swagger stick, stalked the yard. Remember that this was a kindergarten. I called out 'Four eyes'. She spat, "Hand up." I knew not what she meant so she lifted my hand and placed it in position. 'Thwack!' I grabbed my hand thinking the world had ended. "Other hand." 'Thwack!' The other kids hardly reacted, just looked and then went on with their games. Two years later, in the first class of the junior school, we were being introduced to cursive writing by a young male teacher, one of the nicer ones actually. Going round the room we had to name the jumbled letters on the board. I guessed an 'a', a round ruler rapped me hard on the back of my neck. It was apparently an 'g'. One teacher, a tall formidable woman with a green frilled dress to her ankles, would walk up and down the aisles. (We sat boy girl, one of each to a desk, the desks tiered.) Walls painted dark green and a sort of beige. The gas light giving just enough light to write by. The only sounds the hiss of the gas, the teacher's voice giving dictation and the scratch of stylus on slate. She held a ruler. We had to have both hands on the desk top. If a child spelled a word wrongly then the ruler would descend on the knuckles. If a child looked around then Miss's knuckles would click on the side of his or her head. Should we slump then a knuckle would grind into the spine. This by the way was the 'fast class' for bright kids. Being sent to the headmaster to have one's name placed in the 'Punishment Book' meant at least three strokes on each hand. It also meant that any future punishments would be doubled. Another teacher, male and fat, had the amusing habit of calling a group of us to the front of the class of a morning to receive one stroke to each hand. Should we have the temerity to object we would be told that we were bound to earn the cane at some point during the day. We usually did too as we didn't want to waste the sting. We must have been quite dim as I never did work out why the morning whack didn't absolve one from a later stroke as promised. It never did. The only time I didn't get the cane for a misdemeanour was when one play time half a dozen of us were playing tag jumping from desk top to desk top. A teacher came in and I slipped and broke my nose on the edge of a desk. The others all had their names in the book and six from the head. From his expression he would have loved to have given me the same, but my mother had been sent for and I was covered in blood. At a Senior boys' school in Somerset at the start of the 1939-45 war there were sixty twelve year old lads in a class. "Where did they cane you?" "On the hand sir." "Often?" "Yes sir." "Hands hard?" "Yes sir." "Bend over. This part doesn't get hard." Three whacks on stretched shorts. This was the regular penalty for talking in class. Not that the teacher could tell who had offended, he just guessed. But it was pointless to complain. Next time another boy would receive my dues. Fighting in the playground would earn six. So the years progressed, hand or bottom, caning a normal part of daily life that we stoically accepted. The great thing was to show no reaction whatsoever so that that anger and spite in the teacher's face wouldn't change to satisfaction. If we could do that we had won. The child who broke gave the teacher victory. What we would have liked to have done was to have laughed, but that would not have been a good idea. Even a slight smile would invite a double dose. On to the fifties when I was training to become a teacher. When teaching juniors (up to 11 years) I was told that it was perfectly OK to smack a boy or girl at the back of the knee (boys wore shorts and girls skirts) because there it did not show nor bruise. Once I had finished training I must have been lucky with my pupils for I never did have to resort to smacking in all my years of teaching. As part of the training I took some secondary classes. The first day I found myself in a class with thirty noisy teenagers, I was attempting to get going when the door opened and the head walked in, called two boys to the front and gave them each a cut with his cane on a hand. He then slapped the cane on my desk and told me I'd need it if I was to do any teaching and left. He was wrong. I told the kids that I didn't need this, did I? I don't know how much they learned, but I had no trouble. The rule of the rod held sway but ineffectually since one could always find youngsters cutting classes all over the school. Thankfully many of us new teachers were ex-servicemen and women, older and with a natural authority, so the ethos of the classroom changed and corporal punishment vanished. In the late fifties and sixties we tried to earn the respect of the children with our personalities rather than our strong right arm. And of course in 1987 the law changed. One old guy's view. 21 comments
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